However, a new bill by the New Jersey Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee would allow Tesla to resume its direct cars sales in the state. The bipartisan committee voted 4-0 to give Tesla a reprieve as long as the company follows a few simple rules. Tesla would be limited to just four stores in the state (for now) and would be required to have at least one facility to service Tesla vehicles.

“New Jersey prides itself as being pro-business, pro-innovative and pro-jobs. And this is a company that is an American company, an American idea,” said bill sponsor Tim Eustace (D-Bergen). “I think we would be mistaken if we didn’t’ reverse the idea that the MVC made, making it illegal to sell Teslas in New Jersey.”

Tesla Model S

Tesla CEO Musk has long rallied against the dealership model and says that these “middlemen” don’t have customers’ best interests in mind. Musk points to the fact that dealerships make a large portion of their profits from vehicle services (repairs, routine maintenance, etc.), but electric vehicles like the Model S require far less maintenance than conventional automobiles, lessening the need for middlemen.

This latest move by New Jersey comes after Musk lashed out at Governor Chris Christie, stating, “Anyone who has been through the conventional auto dealer purchase process knows, consumer protection is pretty much the furthest thing from the typical car dealer’s mind.” Musk even invoked “Bridgegate” by stating that if selling through dealerships ensures “consumer protection”, then “Gov. Christie has a bridge closure he wants to sell you.”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

More recently a number of directors for the Federal Trade Commission have come out in direct support for Tesla’s direct sales model in two separateblog postings. The FTC noted that the market should determine if a direct sales model is beneficial to customers. “Our point has not been that new methods of sale are necessarily superior to the traditional methods—just that the determination should be made through the competitive process,” said the FTC directors in an April blog posting.

“We hope lawmakers will recognize efforts by auto dealers and others to bar new sources of competition for what they are—expressions of a lack of confidence in the competitive process that can only make consumers worse off.”

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed here are solely that of my own and are not representative of Ford Motor Company or its affiliates.

Canada Revenue Agency has a MUCH better handle on both Federal and Provincial taxes than IRS and the various Departments of Treasury in the States.

You can call them up and ask them a question and they've made it a point/mission to answer you within the first two minutes, and if it's a more detailed question, they refer you to the backline support people. And if there's a question that they can't answer right away, they'll go research it and call you back and tell you EXACTLY how to do within a couple of days. (I had to ask them how to report my US 401(k) contributions on my Canadian taxes, and they got back to me in like 3 days, and tell me all the forms that I needed and how to fill it out. It was awesome! And the guy gave me his name so if I have more questions, I can call him back for further clarification.)

They've already figured that it's MUCH better to educate the masses so that they'll do it right, rather than having them correct it for them.

CRA doesn't have much of a handle on provincial taxes, because if they did, I wouldn't have to fill out a complete duplicate set of taxes for the Quebec government... with slightly different numbers and slips for all of them, minimizing the amount of shared data.

Luckily, using online tax software makes it pretty easy, so it only takes half an hour to an hour to do my taxes each year. It was much more painful when I did it on paper.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA